Two Degrees of Freedom

The second morning keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon began with a clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation. George Dyson
had brought the segment to introduce his father Freeman Dyson. The audience
watched both the screen and the reaction of the elder Dyson to the Star Trek
plot, which centered on the discovery of a Dyson
Sphere, which is described in the Wikipedia as "a hypothetical structure
first described in 1959 by the physicist Freeman Dyson in a short paper published
in the journal Science entitled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red
Radiation". It is an artificial hollow sphere of matter around a star designed
to capture nearly all of the star's radiated energy for industrial use."

Freeman laughed at the clip and said "You never know what's going to catch
the eye. It's a lot of nonsense, but it's good fun".

Freeman
Dyson has spent the past 50 years as a physicist at the Princeton Institute
for Advanced Study. George Dyson describes himself as a boat designer, writer,
and historian of technology. George's sister Esther Dyson was to have been a
third panelist focusing on the future of emerging technologies
and business models. Unfortunately, present day technologies weren't enough
to get her from Dallas to Portland in time.

Biotechnology

At the moment, Freeman Dyson is mostly interested in biotechnology. He makes
the analogy to computers. When computers moved into the household, they became
tools for income tax, homework, and games. He said that people are more attached
to their computers than to their spouses. This same domestication could happen
in biotechnology.

Dyson spoke of the beauty and passion he saw at a recent flower show in Philadelphia
as well as the lizards and snakes he saw at a reptile show. He thinks ahead
to a time when there are home kits for growing and modifying flowers and reptiles.
He muses that you can never tell how technology grows.

George added that the only things you need in order "to do genetic engineering
are a computer and a credit card. You can buy DNA synthesizers." His father
chimed in that "they are not for teenagers yet; they cost in the tens of
thousands but they will come down in price." He guesses that we are about 40 years behind where we are in the computer world.

Tim O'Reilly turned the conversation to risk and noted that there are people
who are worried about the implications of these home kits. Dyson agreed that
this is for good reason. As you prepare for a time when you can buy the seeds
or eggs and kid competes with friends to grow the prickliest cactus or the cutest dinosaur
you need to ask:

Is it possible to put a stop to it,

is it desirable to, and

how do you set up the laws, the enforcement, the rules of the game.

An audience member asked how we avoid being doomed by biotechnology. Dyson
answered, "by being lucky. We always live on luck. It's the nature of life and
evolution. We have to make the best of things." He later added that we are "living
in a society that is amazingly risk averse but at the same time does all this
crazy stuff. People don't understand the nature of risk and think they can make
their lives 100 percent safe." Tim quoted Marvin Minsky as saying that what we really
need is a Department of Homeland Arithmetic.

Complicated Behavior

Tim asked George Dyson to talk about his dropping out of high school
to go to the Pacific Northwest to build kayaks. George said that formal schools
tend to make a distinction between people who do things with their hands and
people who do things with their minds. Instead, Dyson believes that we must
encourage both.

Tim gave examples of people returning to building things with their hands.
Dyson agreed but reminded Tim of a time when the American male right of
passage was to take apart a carburetor. Soon cars had fuel injection and not
carburetors. There was a move to using CAD rather than working with our hands.
He thinks it's a good movement when we can once again take our computers apart.

An audience member asked if, "As systems become more complicated, do they
become beyond the human mind to appreciate." Freeman answered that this has
always been true. "The important things in the world are problems with society
that we don't understand at all. The machines will become more complicated but
they won't be more complicated than the societies that run them."

Dyson answered the next question by saying that stem cell research is important.
He added, "Not as important scientifically as it is politically. It should be
going forward. Happy to see the Democrats are raising their voices. Whether
it will cure diseases or not is unclear."

Freeman described a paper called "A New Biology for a New Century."
He summarizes the paper as saying that Darwinian biology was a 3 billion
year interlude. "When life began you had free software; you didn't have species,
you had a community of cells sharing resources, sharing their tricks. One day
some little cell found some proprietary tricks and set up its own platform
and became a species. From then on it was all downhill. The Darwinian process
started with this specialization."

Freeman answered a question about values and technology by saying that "For
me, technology is just a tool and doesn't have religious overtones." Another questioner
asked about his thoughts on the end of the universe. Dyson smiled, "Well, it's
not looking good."

Daniel H. Steinberg
is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles for the Pragmatic Programmers. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack and other Mac developer conferences.